cyocum

• About: Celticist, Computer Scientist, Nerd, sometimes a poet...

Recent Actions

• Posted Semantic Web/Linked Data to cyocum

  Many of you who have been around computers for as long as I have Web. It was touted in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s as a way to organise and reason over the Web. This was before the rise of Google and …

• Posted Jedi Anchorites and Early Ireland to cyocum

  I went to see the new Star Wars film on my birthday. I feel now that the movie has been out for a few weeks that I could discuss the striking final scene. This final scene is also of great interest to any one wants to understand and appreciate…

• Commented on Citations In the Humanities (Update)
  Nothing, absolutely nothing. I have basically taken this over as my regular blog. I write about my many different interests (including programming) here....
• Posted Citations In the Humanities (Update) to cyocum

  This is a followup from this post. You will want to read that first before continuing.

  I just wanted to let everyone know that the British Library now has a means like the Library of Congress to link…

• Posted Book Review: The Origins of the Irish to cyocum

  The Origins of the Irish, J. P. Mallory, Thames & Hudson: London, 2013, ISBN:9780500051757

  To give away the game before starting, I would like to say that this book would be an excellent addition to the lib…

• Posted Open Access: Second Thoughts to cyocum

  I have always been a proponent of Open Access scholarship. The days where dissemination of scholarship cost a significant amount of money are over. However, I am having some second thoughts. Most of these lie in the fact that, while I like…

• Commented on Annotating PDFs with Evince
  Hi, no problem. I just tried to figure out how to delete them and I don’t have a clue, honestly :(. This is probably why you have to save the file separately as it becomes a permanently part of the...
• Posted Some Diagnostic Features of Middle Irish to cyocum

  A friend of mine, with whom I am teaching Old Irish, asked for some diagnostic features of Middle Irish so I thought I would put it here to help them and anyone else who may want to know.

  Introduction

  There are many different …

• Posted Citations in the Humanities to cyocum

  I have written a few articles and more than a few essays for school/class. I know most of the major citations styles (MHRA, MLA, Chicago, etc.). Mostly, however, I use biblatex to format them all. However, I have begun to think that most of these citation styles are really just pointers to…

• Commented on Ocaml, Unicode, and Hashtables
  Hi, Sorry for taking so long to respond. You are correctly. I was just really worried that the comparison wouldn’t work with the language I was dealing with (Old Irish) and I wanted to make sure I was getting the...
• Commented on Writing State Monads in Ocaml
  So I think I have figured it out. Basically what I am calling “empty” is what Haskell calls “initial state”. I force the user of StateMonad to know what the inital state is when they define the module. I am...
• Commented on Writing State Monads in Ocaml
  Hi Phil, Thanks for this! I am still unsure about the empty. How do I fire the function in that case without something of the proper time to pass in?...
• Posted Writing State Monads in Ocaml to cyocum

  One of my projects for quite a while is to understand Monads. I have been working on this, off and on, for an embarrassing amount of time. Yes, I could have just learned Haskell and that would have done it but I wanted to be a pain in the…

• Commented on Publicly accessible archive of perl security advisories?
  You may want to see this which a user friendly version of the CVEs from National Vulnerability Database....
• Posted More Ocaml and Unicode to cyocum

  I was wondering how you would do string encoding translation in Camomile (the Ocaml Unicode library). Why would you want to do this? Well, for instance, if you get a UTF-16 encoded string and you need to use PCRE on it, which only takes UTF-8 input. This means that you need to translate your…

• Posted Ocaml, Unicode, and Hashtables to cyocum

  So, Ocaml does not support Unicode out of the box. The “string” type is an 8 bit byte and that’s that. Some find this to be a major failing of the language in general and it is a pain in the ass. However, there is a unicode library for ocaml

• Posted Ocaml and Hashtables to cyocum

  Coming from a Perl background and seeing the Ocaml Hashtbl documentation for the first time, it can be really confusing. Especially since there is no keys, values, and each functions in the documentation. So, first of…

• Posted How to do confrence proceedings in (Xe)Latex to cyocum

  So, I had actually been wondering this for quite a while as I had thought that I would at some point be asked to typeset a journal or conference proceedings. I searched on Google but I could never get anything worthwhile to come up. However, I decided the time for research was over and the…

• Commented on Fun with Git
  Yes, it does. I must have missed it when I was looking at the man file. Thanks!...
• Posted Fun with Git to cyocum

  So, git has the —all command, which adds all tracked and untracked files for staging to commit. I really dislike this because I wanted something that would just add all the tracked files for staging to commit. So, a friend of mine in the office said that he had a shell script…

• Posted Ocaml Pet Peeve to cyocum

  While I generally like Ocaml (as some of you may have guessed), there is one pet peeve of mine with the language: record fields names are module wide rather than record specific. For example:

  type t = { blah : int }

  The record field blah is now a module wide name so…

• Posted Annotating PDFs with Evince to cyocum

  For a very long time, I was rather stuck because, as a scholar in the humanities who uses LaTeX, I could not get people to use LaTeX because they could not annotate people’s work without a professional copy of Acrobat. Well, I have figured out how to do this using Evince. How you may ask?…

• Commented on Books and Ebooks: Renumerations on the Future
  DRM is an optional part of the EPUB standard so you could end up in the same position as a Kindle owner which all depends on your publisher....
• Posted Books and Ebooks: Renumerations on the Future to cyocum

  My GF recently published a book, The Girl in the Bunker, which has a ebook…

• Commented on Google+: A Review
  I understand what you are saying but even if they just had a “to integrate with Google Buzz, please press this button” and had a blurb about what the implications were, that would be fine with me....
• Posted Google+: A Review to cyocum

  So, I got an invite to Google+ so I logged in and had a look around. I do like the rotary phone style addition of people to a “Circle”. Overall, it has the normal Googlely look and feel, which I like. However, there are problems, mostly due to…

• Posted Mutually Recursive Types to cyocum

  Unlike C/C++, Ocaml does not allow you to have “forward declarations” of types. In other words, if you have a record type A that has an entry that of type B and type B has an entry of type A, you cannot forward declare B so that it is in scope for record type A. In code:

• Commented on Bitcoin: Money is a sign of poverty
  Emergent behavior in complex systems is notoriously hard to predict Our contingency plans aren’t often flexible enough to handle black swan events Confirmation bias leads us to treat economics as something almost religious in nature One other problem that...
• Commented on Bitcoin: Money is a sign of poverty
  Bottom line… any suggestion to “please build inflation into the currency” is all well and good, but there are devilishly tricky issues to tackle before such suggestions can go anywhere beyond wishful thinking. Agreed....
• Commented on Bitcoin: Money is a sign of poverty
  You have misunderstood something. Bitcoin actually relies on the fact that all transactions ever are published and public. It is as far from being anonymous as you can get. What I understand is that you can track all the...

Comment Threads

• parv commented on Publicly accessible archive of perl security advisories?

  Ha! My query was quite a duplicate of brian d f's; I should have searched blogs.perl too before posting. Thanks much.

• Philed commented on Writing State Monads in Ocaml

  In Haskell, it’s just a parameter to “runState”.

  I think what you’re trying to do is avoid the need for this parameter and just have a default value. But I think in that case you want to use option, and empty is then just None (which is literally empty).

  Basically, I’d separate out the idea of state from the idea of state + default values. If you start messing with transformers, you can actually express this compositionally. Then in the composed module, you’ll probably define some runDefault function based on

  val de…

• Philed commented on Writing State Monads in Ocaml

  Ack. Of course. “Initial state” is a better term.

  So here’s a question: what happens when we want to allow the state to be uninitialised? In most languages, the answer is obvious: we just set the variable to null.

  But, of course, in Ocaml, we don’t like null. So instead, if we want a state which can be uninitialised, we want an option.

• ddhanlon commented on Annotating PDFs with Evince

  That’s too bad. Thanks anyway. I can’t believe this can’t be easier to do.

• Aristotle commented on Citations In the Humanities (Update)

  What does this have to do with Perl?

  It’s written by a guy who does Perl. :-) Which is what this site is about: people who do Perl.